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Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

macrumors.com

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Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#411

Post by twirlock »

dang wrote: post #463
dang wrote: post #181

All: these Epic vs. Apple threads, and $BigCo vs. $BigCo threads in general, have unfortunately been seeing more name-calling, accusations of manipulation, flamebait/unsubstantive posts, and other things that break the HN guidelines. If you comment, can you please avoid that? Reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html would help. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoug…

This is a stub comment to collect the replies so we can collapse them, to prevent offtopicness. Sorry, no-JS users.

Oh now suddenly shills exist.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#412

Post by Reedx »

makecheck wrote: post #3

Of all the things about this, the fact that the Fortnite competitor PUBG is now being “featured” by Apple just ticks me off so much. Talk about being petty. Are there school-aged children running the App Store now (or the executive suite?). I realize Apple has the right to decide who they feature but come on . Being featured is important , it’s a big deal and it can make a serious difference to any developer’s income…

Tim Epic (not to be confused with Tim Apple) retweeted that with an amusing response:

"While waiting for Apple to #FreeFortnite on iOS and Mac, here’s another awesome battle royale game powered by Unreal Engine!"

https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/129941176668281651...

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#413

Post by mantap »

urda wrote: post #386
MaximumMadness wrote: post #21

Apple is truly doing themselves a disservice here, if Epic wins this battle Apple will undoubtedly be painted as the bad guy, and other major companies will smell blood in the water when it comes taking down a competitor. Case in point; Tinder, Microsoft, Facebook, Spotify have all openly backed Epic and started to call attention to features that are impacted by this 30% fee. Status quo isn't going to cut it, and it…

> if Epic wins this battle Apple That's a big IF. You will find it damn-near-impossible to have any legal standing when you willfully violate the terms of service with a provider as openly as Epic did. Apple is fully in the right here, and as a consumer I'm glad Apple isn't messing around with their software security. What Epic did was down right sneaky, and they are (rightfully) being punished for it. Epic started t…

Contracts are not laws, if you breech a contract then one of the possible outcomes is that you will end up in court arguing whether the contract is valid. That is what happened in this case. The law would be especially toothless if you had to obey a contract in order to dispute its validity.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#414

Post by orangecat »

bitxbit wrote: post #111
leptoniscool wrote: post #24

Apple is a monopoly. When Microsoft was investigated and fined for anti-trust behaviors, it hasn't engaged in this level of abuse.

Might be an unpopular opinion but I don’t think they are acting to the level of MSFT in the 90s. What MSFT did would be equivalent to Apple forcing everyone to use its apps and not allow any competing apps. Also recall that Jobs was pretty adamant about allowing third-party apps in the beginning. Now, do I think 30% is ridiculous in 2020? Yes. But it made sense a decade ago when having a half decent working app almos…

Might be an unpopular opinion but I don’t think they are acting to the level of MSFT in the 90s.

It's far worse. Microsoft may have played dirty tricks with bundling, but they never prevented developers from distributing competing software. If Microsoft had the control over Windows that Apple does over iOS, they never would have allowed web browsers (for "security", no doubt) and we might be in a Windows monoculture today.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#415

Post by yyyk »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #343
yyyk wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality of the legal system is that all small companies would just get worn out and forced to settle against Apple, regardless of the justice of their complaint. No company smaller than Epic could afford to file such a case. I wonder whether any company could become large enough without having some way for people to argue that "it is not the general this particular battle needs".

Sure, Epic's size is absolutely going to be helpful here. But there are other larger companies that could probably make better cases against Apple if they chose to: Amazon and Microsoft come to mind immediately, with Facebook a possibility given the events of just the last couple of days. I'm not saying Epic is a bad poster child for this case because Epic is a sleazy company (although from all accounts they kind of…

Fair enough. Some companies do have a stronger case. MS and Amazon would however get pilloried here due to... other issues. Not many candidates around (unless some rich entity were to support a company's legal case from the shadows? These things do happen).

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#416

Post by jcranmer »

bagacrap wrote: post #165
yyyk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's irrelevant whether Apple are technically a monopoly or not; Apple abuses their iOS market power to force vendors to use their payment system.

Actually I do think it matters if Apple is technically a monopoly, as laws are technical documents. If you agree Apple is not a monopoly then the worst thing you can say is, "I don't think Apple is being very nice." And Apple is not forcing anyone to write ios apps. They are curating a store. Should lawmakers dictate to Walmart which products to stock or how much to buy and sell them for?

> Actually I do think it matters if Apple is technically a monopoly, as laws are technical documents.

Whether or not Apple has a monopoly is irrelevant for the antitrust laws.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#417

Post by bscphil »

outworlder wrote: post #337
yyyk wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality of the legal system is that all small companies would just get worn out and forced to settle against Apple, regardless of the justice of their complaint. No company smaller than Epic could afford to file such a case. I wonder whether any company could become large enough without having some way for people to argue that "it is not the general this particular battle needs".

Or, you know, you could get multiple companies working together. Why does it have to be a single company?

Theoretical objections of the sort "this could have been done some other way" are always rather strange, because they tend to ignore the actual fact that it has not been done some other way.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#418

Post by urda »

mantap wrote: post #413
urda wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if Epic wins this battle Apple That's a big IF. You will find it damn-near-impossible to have any legal standing when you willfully violate the terms of service with a provider as openly as Epic did. Apple is fully in the right here, and as a consumer I'm glad Apple isn't messing around with their software security. What Epic did was down right sneaky, and they are (rightfully) being punished for it. Epic started t…

Contracts are not laws, if you breech a contract then one of the possible outcomes is that you will end up in court arguing whether the contract is valid. That is what happened in this case. The law would be especially toothless if you had to obey a contract in order to dispute its validity.

> Contracts are not laws

But laws govern them nonetheless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_contract_law for starters.

The court told Epic how to get in compliance with Apple, they refused, Apple in their terms clearly states they have the right to terminate their account. That's the facts of the case, it doesn't matter what anyone feels.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#419

Post by pier25 »

threeseed wrote: post #297
pier25 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't uninstall Safari from iOS. In fact you can't even browse the web without it as Apple prohibits any other browsing engine (Chrome, FF, etc, are using WKWebView). I don't know the numbers but I imagine there are more iOS devices now than there were Windows PCs back in the 90s.

Apple does NOT prevent other browsing engines. It prevents you from dynamically compiling code at runtime which is a needed rule because otherwise apps would just run around the curation process.

Yes they do, quite explicitly in fact:

> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#420

Post by cma »

system2 wrote: post #2

I wish every damn micro transaction app gets removed one day. Of course no one will do it but I simply hate everything about these apps forcing parents to pay small fees for stupid pixels because their kids begs them to do it. Sorry, nothing else new to add to the topic, just venting and have absolutely no sympathy to apps tricking kids to spend money on tiny cellphone games. My niece begged her mother to buy a roblo…

At least a Roblox dress likely doesn't use something near slave labor for what is ultimately disposable fashion like traditional throw away clothing production.
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